ARTSLANT INTERVIEWS

There was a time before trigger warnings and safe spaces when it seemed the best way of addressing hypocrisy, lies, and, most of all power, was to find a way to undermine the authority of whatever it was you were pissed off at by getting into it, subverting it, and most of all, participating in the dialogue of culture. It might be called irony, satire, or parody, or, for lack of anyone ever defining it, “The Poetry of Hating Shit.” Some of our cultural institutions, like , Punk Rock, and the...
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According to artist, writer, and theorist James Bridle, the autonomous car and the issues it raises stand in for many of the questions facing humanity today: what will ultimately result from our relationship with technology and artificial intelligence? How will we collectively adapt to world where jobs—like truck driving—have been automated out of existence? How will we deal with increasingly opaque, complex systems of governance and exchange?
Bridle, whose work spans a variety of topics...
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Anicka Yi, the recipient of the 2016 Hugo Boss Prize, opened consisting of three works, Lifestyle Wars, Immigrant Caucus, and Force Majeure, at the Guggenheim on April 21, 2017. The exhibition title is one part indictment, one part plea.
“Life is cheap” is usually said with a quiet lilt; eyes down, a slight shake of the head. The disgust is projected both outward and inward. It’s a gesture of shame. But Yi hints at perhaps another invocation of the saying—that life is in fact cheap and easy...
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Although I have known Peter Williams for decades, and have written about his work in the past, we had never sat down and done a proper interview—it’s been more of a 30-year-long conversation. Recently, however, I wanted to get down his thoughts on several of his latest bodies of work: urgent paintings that are at once timely and have art historical resonance. His inclusion in the November group exhibition , at David & Schweitzer, saw the artist confronting Whiteness and police brutality...
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I recently met with septuagenarian artist Lynn Hershman Leeson just after the opening of her latest solo show, , at Bridget Donahue Gallery. Her first solo with the gallery in 2015 sparked something of a rediscovery of her groundbreaking work, even though she has spent her decades-long career pioneering in the realm of technology in visual art. In 2016, a comprehensive retrospective entitled Civic Radar at ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany, charted her career from its early performative days in the 70s...
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This text is written on a scrap of paper, torn from a sketchbook and almost carelessly tacked to the wall of Marijn van Kreij’s studio, just outside of Amsterdam. It’s a daily reminder resonating in the space where the artist spends most of his waking hours drawing and painting, but also reading, looking at pictures from his ever-growing art book library, immersing himself in this repository of text and image.
Van Kreij’s work is the antithesis of what art is according to many: the work...
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DNA (Deoxyribonucleic acid) is often imagined as the key to identity, as the progenitor of who we are. It is nature within us and the scaffolding onto which we are nurtured into who we are. However, through epigenetics, viral transfer, and genetic drift, we are becoming more aware of the superposition of DNA and its ability to change, inherit, mute, and express with degrees of certainty, not certitude.
At the same time, DNA extraction and sequencing has never been cheaper or easier. In light...
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Genevieve Gaignard is a magician. She sees you and she sees you seeing her. Revealing our experience and understanding of race, gender, sexuality, and their complex perceptions under the western heteropatriarchal gaze, the Los Angeles-based artist uses self-portraiture and sculpture to find truth in the abstract aporia of identity. The characters she creates and portrays engage with the aesthetic language of Afropunk, substance chic Hollywood glamor, and the suburban working class of...
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This past Thursday, I arrived at Petzel Gallery amidst a flurry of installation activity, scissor lifts backing furtively out of the installed exhibition spaces, and the last of the vinyl lettering still going up on the walls and windows. Simon Denny, the New Zealand-born, Berlin-based artist was speaking fervently to Friedrich Petzel and a few others about his work, visibly excited and engaged about his latest exhibition, Blockchain Future States, due to open that evening.
In a walkthrough,...
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—for those preoccupied by a tumultuous election season, the title has a timely ring. But Meleko Mokgosi’s expansive project, now halfway through its eight planned chapters, has little to do with the drama that is U.S. presidential politics. The artist, who painstakingly researches and storyboards his enormous paintings, had mapped out his newest works long before anyone had ever imagined a Trump/Hillary showdown in the cards.
Lerato and Comrades II, the latest instalments in Democratic...
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